I have a different response than does my co-blogger Jim Lindgren to the recently-released White House summary of tentative findings as to how the counterterrorism community failed to detect and stop the Christmas attack. Jim is right that the government report does not give a full account, and it doesn’t give full credit to the […]
Archive | War on Terror
Ten Unanswered Questions in the Flight 253 Summary
On Thursday the White House released a summary of a preliminary report on the attempted bombing of a Christmas flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. I was disappointed by the lack of a clear description of what happened. Indeed, the attempted bomber is barely mentioned. It reads like a document written by bureaucrats for bureaucrats […]
The Al Bihani Case and the Domestic Application of International Law
Today’s important D.C. Circuit decision in Al Bihani v. Obama held that international law does not in any way constrain the president in the exercise of his executive authority under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force that gave him the power to wage war against al Qaeda and its allies. I am […]
Manuel Noriega, the Supreme Court, and the War on Terror
Former Panamanian general and “chief executive officer” Manuel Noriega will forever be associated with the “war on drugs”: After the US invaded Panama and removed him from power in 1989, he was convicted of federal drug trafficking charges and he has been in prison ever since. But it appears that he has come to the […]
D.C. Circuit Upholds Broad Detention Authority
Earlier today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit released its opinion in Al Bihani v. Obama, its first substantive post-Boumediene Guantanamo detainee habeas decision. In an opinion by Judge Janice Rogers Brown, the court rejected Al Bihani’s habeas claims, affirmed the district court’s denial of his habeas petition and embraced a fairly […]
More Airport Security Tradeoffs
Last week, I wrote about several underappreciated tradeoffs in airport security policy. Here’s another one: TSA screeners, like the rest of us, have only limited time and attention span. The more these finite resources are devoted to “security theater” procedures that have little or no value, the less of it there is available to focus […]
How Does Cost-Benefit Analysis Draw Lines in the Sand?
By Kenneth Anderson on December 31, 2009 5:09 pm in Cost-Benefit Analysis, Counter-Terrorism Policy, Terrorism, War on Terror
Many of us who write, read, and comment on this blog work frequently with cost-benefit analysis, perhaps typically through discipline specific tools, whether in economics or finance or business or engineering or other disciplines. In my case, in my day job I’m mostly an international business-finance professor who uses the typical, and really not very […]
Execution Even More than Design – Revisiting Richard Posner on Domestic Counterterrorism
By Kenneth Anderson on December 31, 2009 1:30 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, Terrorism, War on Terror
A difficult real world lesson for academics like me is that execution matters. It very often matters much more than institutional design. A suboptimal institutional design often matters less than how it is executed, and the attention with which it is executed. Hard for academics like me to keep in mind, because we are conceptually […]
Yemen, Somalia and ….
By Kenneth Anderson on December 30, 2009 8:20 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, International Law, Targeted Killing, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
Following up on Eric’s post re President Obama’s legal authority to target in Yemen … I’m a bit of a broken record on the need for the United States government to articulate a more coherent legal basis for its targeted killing. But it is just more so since the Christmas terrorist attack … the range […]
Do Politicians Have Good Incentives to Promote Airport Security?
In a response to my post arguing that politicians have strong incentives to not enact good security measures before terrorist attacks and engage in “security theater” afterwards, Orin argues that politicians actually do have good incentives: In my experience, politicians have the right incentives in this area. The American public consistently cares very passionately about […]
Threat Assessment, Ideology, and Airport Security — A Response to Ilya
I appreciate Ilya’s post below on the political economy of airport security, although it differs in some ways from my experience following surveillance law and national security law since I started at the Justice Department in 1998. I thought I would offer a quick explanation of my own take on these issues drawn from that […]
Public Ignorance and the Political Economy of Airport Security: Why Governments Don’t Take Enough Precautions Before Attacks and Engage in “Security Theater” Afterwards
Co-blogger Orin Kerr points out that some people claim that governments fail to take proper airport security precautions before an attack happens, while others worry that they will overreact once an attack does occur. Unfortunately, these two problems are not mutually exclusive. It could well be that governments both fail to take proper precautions before […]
Bruce Schneier on Airport Security
I’m no security expert. But Bruce Schneier is a leading scholar in the field, and in this interview he makes some of the same points as I did here and here: Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It’ll survive the […]
Relentlessly Tactical, Event-Specific Catastrophism, and the Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis
By Kenneth Anderson on December 29, 2009 3:00 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, Terrorism, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
I’m traveling, so have not been able to comment as I’d like regarding the Christmas terror attack. However, I wanted to add one thought about cost benefit analysis and counter-terrorism. A couple of years ago I wrote a paper on ways in which the American political class is riven by deep foundational disagreements about the […]
Tradeoffs in Airport Security
In the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack on an airplane, there are always calls for increased airport security measures. Some of the proposed new measures may be justified, though others are likely to be “security theater.” But even security measures that do increase safety create difficult tradeoffs that we don’t think enough about. Law […]